By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Book Information

'It is not often that academic books come along which change your way ofseeing things. But this book does just that. It offers an astonishingrichness of texts, combining genuinely innovative theory and insight withreadable, usable and practical analysis. Joanna Gavins shows Text Worldtheory to be a way of understanding and engaging with texts that willcontinue to push back frontiers for many years to come.' -Professor Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham

'Text world theory has long been awaiting a comprehensive andcomprehensible introduction. Joanna Gavins' engaging book draws on the richinsights now available in the many strands of cognitive linguistics anddiscourse studies, and weaves them into her illuminating explanations,analyses and often witty commentary. This work is an excellent textbook.But it is more than that: it is a unified theoretical synthesis which atthe same time provides usable tools for practical analysis.' -Paul Chilton, Lancaster University

'Text World Theory' is a cognitive model of all human discourse processing.In this introductory textbook, Joanna Gavins sets out a usable frameworkfor understanding mental representations. Text World Theory is explainedusing naturally occurring texts and real situations, including literaryworks, advertising discourse, the language of lonely hearts, horoscopes,route directions, cookery books and song lyrics. The book will thereforeenable students, teachers and researchers to make practical use of thetext-world framework in a wide range of linguistic and literary contexts.

Key Features

*An accessible and enabling course book which includes suggestions forexploration and further reading.*Draws on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, poeticsand stylistics, and will be attractive to students and researchers workingin all of these disciplines. *Each chapter provides a reader-friendly introduction to an aspect of TextWorld Theory and includes at least two practical applications of theseideas to real discourse examples.